The Secret Life of the Party: The Columnist Explores the Life of Journalist Joseph Alsop

Barring William Randolph Hearst and Dorothy Parker, not that many journalists come to mind whose lives could captivate a theater audience, but in his intricate new play The Columnist, which opened last night on Broadway (directed by Daniel Sullivan), the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Auburn (Proof) confers ink-stained stardom on the syndicated Cold War columnist Joseph Alsop. Caustic, conservative, and Harvard-educated, Alsop was a Georgetown journalist whose lacerating words, high-placed friendships, and combative charisma shaped national policy—and D.C.’s social scene—for decades.

Here’s one illustration of Alsop’s clout: In the wee hours of January 21, 1961, the freshly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy pulled up to Alsop’s Georgetown house to crash his party and unwind after the balls with champagne and conversation. If you know nothing at all about Alsop, this fact alone should whet your interest. But there’s much more to discover about this complicated man and the era in which he wielded his opining power. John Lithgow—in the title role—brilliantly, often scarily, brings to life the man’s outsize aura, with accesses of mirth, outbursts of rage, sudden sobs, implacable frosts, and fits of tetchiness.

A thrill—a chill, almost—comes from watching the action play out onstage (against smoothly shifting sets created by John Lee Beatty) during JFK’s Camelot, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Seeing the leggy furniture, and modern art in Alsop’s Georgetown living room, and watching Alsop and his milder-mannered brother, Stewart (Boyd Gaines), drink whiskey, smoke, and banter as Alsop’s gracious wife, Susan (the excellent Margaret Colin), glides among them watchfully in a long cocktail dress, you have the uncanny sensation that you’re watching Mad Men: Georgetown. Instinctively you start looking for cracks in the characters’ civilized veneer; instantly, they emerge.

Joe Alsop, we learn very quickly, was a closeted homosexual, but that did not prevent him from marrying the well-connected society hostess and writer (her first job was as a Vogue receptionist) Susan Mary Jay Patten, or from deriding President Lyndon B. Johnson as a “bed-wetting pinko sissy-boy,” (in the paraphrase of one of Alsop’s foes) for insufficient hawkishness in the Vietnam War. Auburn’s portrayal makes it clear that while Alsop was not an easy person, he never was that creature he despised above all others: a bore. Like him or hate him, nobody could doubt Alsop’s ferocious conviction of his own opinions. . . or resist his invitations.

At all times, Lithgow projects Alsop’s pride and repression, as the man struggles to conceal hypocrisies he doesn’t admit he possesses and wrongly supposes others do not see. Yet his wife, his brother, his stepdaughter, Abigail, (Grace Gummer) and even professional rivals like David Halberstam (Stephen Kunken) protect him, though Alsop does not return the favor. Auburn has done his homework; every step his characters take lands on emotionally and historically authentic ground, coloring in new panels of a cultural landscape that’s etched deeply in the American psyche.The Columnist runs at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through June 24; thecolumnistbroadway.com